Disability History Gets to Work

In the infamous second episode of the fictional American comedy TV show The Office, Steve Carell's gratingly clueless character Michael encourages his staff to wear index cards with particular races on them for 'diversity day' training.I was reminded of this while reading about the real experience of blind psychologist Adrienne Asch at a 'group dynamics' programme in the mid-1980s during which 'participants were asked to stand under a sign representing their group identification' . 1 Asch was the only disabled person at the meeting, and so, reluctantly, moved away from the sign that said 'woman' and stood under the sign that read 'disabled' .When another participant approvingly told her that she was right to stand there and not 'deny' her identity, Ach exclaimed 'It's for people like you that I have to stand under that sign.You and your attitudes put me there, not my blindness itself ' . 2 Asch (who had a PhD in social psychology from Columbia University) went on to work as an advocate for women and disabled people in the field of bioethics.This moment, when Asch articulated the social model of disability to defend herself as both disabled and a medical professional, is replicated many times with several other individual professionals in Hogan's richly detailed account of how various medical fields interacted with disability activism in the late twentieth century.The book shows how US medical professionals in three fields (clinical psychology, paediatrics and genetic counselling) responded to disability advocacy in the post-war period.Importantly, it demonstrates how professionals with lived experience of disability became self-advocates while working within medicine.These examples of social model activism taking place within the medical model powerfully undercut the social/medical binary framework, though they also demonstrate how powerfully it has functioned as a political tool.It was of course as a political tool that the medical/social model framework originally developed, to separate out impairment from disability in the way that Asch did, making it clear that it was the structures of an inaccessible society that disabled people (the social model) and not their individual bodies (the medical model).From its origins in British Marxist politics, this way of thinking inspired a generation of historians to consider the disabling impacts of 1